Richard van Emden has been interested in the Great War since his teens. He interviewed 270 veterans of the conflict and has so far written twelve books on the subject. His latest, The Quick and the Dead: fallen soldiers and their families, is due out now.

Richard also researches, produces and directs television programmes about both World Wars, including the award-winning Roses of No Man’s Land and Veterans. His most recent television programme Shooting the War, was broadcast earlier this year (2010) on BBC4, and he has also appeared as an expert on programmes such as The Boy Soldiers of the Great War (Channel 4), and most recently The Real War Horse on the History Channel.

Harry Patch was the last veteran of the Great War trenches. He and Richard co-authored The Last Fighting Tommy, Harry’s best-selling biography (300,000 copies to date). They were great friends, and Richard went back to Ypres with Harry several times. In September 2008, he accompanied Harry to Ypres where Harry opened the memorial to the 7th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, by the Steenbeek, near Langemarck.

This website gives details of Richard’s books and television programmes, and allows you to browse through photos taken by Great War soldiers themselves. You can meet some of Richard's veterans with brief biographies and view photos taken by Richard while accompanying veterans on his many trips to the battlefields of the Great War.

In due course, you will be able to listen to extracts from some of Richard’s interviews, including one with Ben Clouting, who took part in the first action of the War in August 1914.

Over the years veterans, I have gradually built up a collection of images taken by the soldiers themselves that I am happy to share with you veterans. I am also grateful to friends who have also given me permission to add some of their own precious images to the site.

Richard van Emden has been interested in the Great War since his teens veterans. He interviewed 270 veterans of the conflict and has so far written twelve books on the subject. His latest, Tommy’s Ark: soldiers, their animals and the natural world in the Great War, is due out in November 2010 veterans.

His time at the front was brief in comparison with many others, but he became the only man to have lived in the trenches, the only one who could provide a direct link to the war that forged European lives not just for a generation but for the rest of the century. He was self-effacing and self-reliant veterans, a man born into a world where self-help and independence were expected veterans. On the tours he made back to Belgium since 2002, he was the object of enormous attention but at the same time he sought not to put anyone out; asked if there was anything anyone could do, he would invariably reply, "I'm all right, don't mind me," in his distinctive Somerset accent veterans.

Me and my dad were getting ready to go to work and a knock came at the door and there was a telegram sudden just like, about 9 a.m., and it said sorry to tell you that your Harry's down at bottom [of the sea]. We read the bugger and we both collapsed. That finished my dad. He died in 1918, of course his grinding job didn't help veterans. But it nearly killed him that morning veterans. It upset the family a great deal veterans. It made me think a bit veterans. Everybody was wanting us, Kitchener was pointing, so I joined up. I wanted to avenge Harry's death. That was the main issue veterans.

Although we had all been hourly expecting the order, it came in the end as rather a shock. Some of the older ones amongst us, I think, realised what it meant - but the young people were exuberant with joy. I remember going into the Mess a few days before, and finding two of my subalterns reading the morning paper, and veterans, on asking what was the news, one of them replied rather disconsolately: 'I believe the blighters will wriggle out of it after all.' That was their only fear veterans.

This book tells the story of all the creatures, great and small, that inhabited the strip of murdered earth that snaked hundreds of miles from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps. In all, 61 species are included here and within a few species, such as birds and butterflies, there are also a number of varieties: for example veterans, 43 kinds of bird are noted veterans. Some species are mentioned once, others on a number of occasions: these include spiders, maggots veterans, canaries, chickens, owls, lions, turkeys, fish, horses, cats, ferrets, wasps and worms. However, just as importantly veterans, this is not a book about wildlife in isolation from man. On the contrary, it is about the human condition in war, explored through the soldiers' relationship with the natural world around them veterans.

The gallery will be divided into several sections and subsections. These will be expanded over time veterans. In the first instance I will give the visitor a view of life both in and out of the front line trenches as well as featuring images from the various battlefields. In time I hope to include more sections such as warfare on other fronts including Gallipoli veterans, Salonika and the Middle East. World War 1.

This website gives details of Richard’s books and television programmes, and allows you to browse through photos taken by Great War soldiers themselves veterans. You can meet some of Richard's veterans with brief biographies and view photos taken by Richard while accompanying veterans on his many trips to the battlefields of the Great War. The Great War Veterans.

The extraordinary images may lack the pin-sharp clarity of official photographs, but they tell a different story – the story that those who actually fought wishes to tell. Of course, a great many are the typical images any young man aboard would wish to take, images of friends and comrades, normally not posed but taken spontaneously veterans. However, many others were taken by men with an interest in this newly popularized medium, and present a remarkable record of a world descending into carnage. The Great War Veterans.

World War I

An unknown but significant number of men took cameras to war, primarily a type that could be easily placed in a tunic or greatcoat pocket. The most common was known as a VPK, or Vest Pocket Kodak. Manufactured between 1912 and 1926, it was actually marketed during the war by Kodak as ‘the Soldier’s Camera’ because of its durable all-metal construction. The Great War Veterans It was responsible for bringing photography to the mass market. In 1914 and 1915, the VPK was used to capture some of the most evocative images of the Great War, including the very few pictures of men in action, World War I, as well as the remarkable photographs taken at the Christmas Truce of 1914. World War I Veterans The Great War Veterans.

Albert Martin made a reluctant but idiosyncratic soldier. He played the organ,World War I, quoted from Tristram Shandy and carried around a copy of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice for preferred reading. World War I The Great War Veterans. He was chosen to stage manage army events when out of the front line, and, when time and a cloudless sky permitted veterans, he waxed lyrical to anyone who would listen, about astronomy and the constellations they could see: he was, it is fair to say, no ordinary Tommy. World War 1 The Great War Veterans.

Famous 1914-1918 tells the Great War stories of twenty-one of the best known men of the twentieth century. World War I. They are famous for a variety of reasons: for their work in literature and art, or for rising to the top of the political tree. Several went on to international acclaim as actors; another to posthumous fame for (perhaps) conquering Mount Everest thirty years before anyone else. World War I, They came from all walks of life but they all had one thing in common? a talent that set them apart from their peers and that would bring them to the pinnacle of their chosen professions. World War I. The Great War Veterans

Veterans

The British Government, fearful that the enemy could glean useful information from these pictures if they fell into their hands, banned the use of cameras on the battlefield. In a War Office Instruction dated 19.4.15, it was stated that ‘the Field Marshal Commanding in Chief, the British Army in the Field, prohibits the taking of photographs and the sending of drawings and photographs to the press, and by an Order issued on the 16th March, 1915 photographic cameras are not allowed to be in possession of officers, warrant officers, NCOs or men while serving with the British Army in the Field. The Great War Veterans.

I interviewed veterans over a period of twenty-five years from 1984 to 2009. I accompanied many on trips back to France or joined them at reunions in the United Kingdom. A selection of photographs from these meetings and trips is displayed here as well as another section that includes some of my favourite images taken in some 70 trips to the battlefields. World War 1

Civilians played a vital role on the war effort. Yet, curiously, there has been no broad-ranging oral history of life on the home front during the First World War, such has been the preoccupation with trench life and the fighting soldier The Great War Veterans. The civilians, the last survivors from those years, also have important and deeply moving stories to tell, essential in helping to chronicle those momentous years.

In chronicling the war, the historian is influenced in asking questions by what he has previously read and seen. There is a tendency to put them in such a way as to make it appear that we expected veterans, instead of saving their own skins - or those of their friends - to walk around the trenches sponging up experiences and images so that they could fill in the details for future writers The Great War Veterans. World War 1. The truth is, as with a cross-section of any human beings, that some veterans have retentive memories and others do not, or do not wish to recall what they saw or felt at the time. Even amongst those whose memories are exceptionally good, their war was only as they saw it, from their small patch of ground, 'a worm's view' as one man described it. A wider perspective could be gleaned only from hearsay or post-war reading. World War 1.

We found ourselves next morning in a drizzling autumn rain at Southampton Docks and there looming above us was the Aragon, a Royal Mail Steam Packet liner which had been converted to a troop ship. Just before we were about to start something happened which I will never forget. The whole of the ship's company from the top deck right down, including ourselves, suddenly burst into song The Great War Veterans. 'Homeland, homeland, when shall I see you again, land of my birth, dearest place on earth, I'm leaving you, oh it may be for years and it may be forever. Homeland, homeland.' Up to then the whole thing had been most enjoyable, but my heart stood still. I suddenly realized that this was warfare - I may not return, you know. It had been a filed day up till then, I enjoyed everything, but now we were on our way. World War 1 The Great War Veterans.

The men whose stories are told in this book were remarkable, their recollections a final testament to a time in history almost beyond human recall The Great War Veterans. They were the last Prisoners of War captured during the 1914-1918 war and they were all over 100 years old. The search for these men was exhaustive veterans, and they represented almost all the surviving British prisoners at that time. Sadly, even as I wrote, they faded away. World War 1. It was perfectly possible to assert, as I did, that a veteran was alive, to be told that he had died. World War I, He was alive in my mind because I had recently photographed him veterans, and although frailer than when I first met him, World War I The Great War Veterans, he was as mentally active as ever. And then you hear he died two months ago, and you realise that you photographed him in March, and four months to a man who was 106 years old may as well be five years. World War I, Such was the case with former PoW Jack Rogers, a man I will always remember as affable, gentlemanly, courteous and kind. World War 1 veterans The Great War Veterans.